Chat: Display the avatar left from the user name
There is one aspect more that somehow breaks my mental model when I try to figure out:
"what text belongs to which user and which avatar belongs to the nickname of that user?"
-- The avatar doesn't appear where I would expect it.
Request:
Do it for the Chat similar as it is in the Anytype community forum:
Display the avatar direct left from the user's nick name!
That makes it clear on the first glance who's writing.
And it makes it impossible to confuse a nick name with written text!
-- Things like that can easily happen, especially if the nick name is on its own a "normal word" or a sentence.
For example "nightmare" or "bad guy", or "Good morning".
But if the avatar is always direct left from the nick name, no confusion possible anymore.
2 Comments
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·2 days agoThank you for the detailed feedback — that's a really clear example of the cognitive friction. You're right that positioning the avatar directly next to the username would make the visual hierarchy instant and remove that parsing ambiguity, especially with usernames that read like natural language.
We've logged this as a design improvement for the chat interface. Before we sketch any changes, though, a couple of clarifying questions:
- Current layout — when you say the avatar doesn't appear where you'd expect it, where is it showing up now relative to the username and message text? (Just want to make sure we're looking at the same spot.)
- Mobile vs. desktop — does this mental-model break happen on both, or is it specific to one view?
Those details will help the design team nail down the exact tweak needed.
Same comment as a previous post you made. It sounds like you are requesting chat to be a forum-like discussion, which it is not. It takes the format of a chat, not forum. Which means that it prioritises fast messages and somewhat messy conversation. While design can be optimised to be better, no doubt. I also agree that the current UI design is rather messy in certain situations. That being said, it still conforms to all the basic standards of a chat (icon placement, bubbles, name placement, etc.)
I will close those post. If you would like a 'forum-discussion-like' format to exist, then I think that's a worth feature request. This would behave more like Slack, I imagine. But trying to make chat more like a forum doesn't make sense.